The words in the last two columns are also distinguished by the semantic property ‘human’

which is also found in :

Doctor, dean, professor, bachelor, parent, baby, child
The last two of these words are also specified as ‘young’. That is, part of the meaning of the
word baby and child is that they are ‘human’ and ‘young’.
The meanings of words have other properties. The word father has the properties
‘male’ and ‘adult’, as do man and bachelor; but father also has the property ‘parent’, which
distinguishes it from the other two words.
Mare, in addition to ‘female’ and ‘animal’, must also denote a property of
‘horseness’. Words have general semantic properties such as ‘human’ or ‘parent’, as well as
more specific properties that give the word its particular meaning.
The same semantic property may occur in words of different categories. ‘Female’ is
part of the meaning of the noun mother, of the verb breast-feed, and of the adjective pregnant.
‘Cause’ is a verbal property of darken, kill, beautify, and so on.
darken cause to become dark
kill cause to day
beautify cause to become beautiful
Other semantic properties that help account for the meaning of verbs are as follows:
Semantic Property Verbs having it
motion bring, fall, plod, walk, run…
contact hit, kiss, touch…
creation build, imagine, make…
sense see, hear, feel…
For the most part no two words have exactly the same meaning. Additional semantic
properties make for finer and finer distinctions in meaning. Plod is distinguished from walk
by the property ‘slow’, and stalk from plod by the property such as ‘purposeful’.
We can then use this idea to describe part of the meaning of words as having either
plus (+) or minus (-) that particular feature. The feature that the noun boy has is ‘+ animate’
(= denotes an animate being) and the feature that the noun hamburger has is ‘- animate’ (=
denotes an inanimate being).
The above example is an illustration of a procedure for analyzing meaning in terms
of semantic features. Features such as ‘+ animate, - animate’, ‘+ human, - human’, ‘+ female,
- female’ for example, can be treated as the basic elements involved in differentiating the
meaning of each word in a language from every other word.
 If we had to provide the crucial distinguishing features of the meaning of a set of
English words such as table, horse, boy, man, girl, woman, we could begin with the
following diagram.
Table Horse Boy Man Girl Woman
Animate - + + + + +
Human - - + + + +
Female - - - - + +
Adult - + - + - +

From a feature analysis like this, we can say that at least part of the meaning of the
word girl in English involves the elements [+human, +female, -adult].
We can also characterize the feature that is crucially required in a noun in order for it
to appear as the subject of a particular verb, supplementing the syntactic analysis along with
semantic features.
The ___________________is reading the newspaper.
N [+ human]
This approach gives us the ability to predict which nouns make this sentence
semantically odd.
Some examples would be table, horse and hamburger, because none of them have
the required feature [+ human].
The approach just outlined is a start on analyzing the conceptual components of
word meaning, but it is not without problems.
For many words in a language it may not be easy to come up with neat components
of meaning. If we try to think of the components or features, we would use to differentiate the
nouns advice, threat and warning, for example, we would not be very successful.